Gale
by BasilioBoy777
Summary: Sequel to Bulldozer, part 3 of 4. Gayle Windslow ponders the events of a most strange day that happened a few months ago, on an unusually blustery day. Oneshot.


**Gale**

Gayle Windslow sat on her bed in her room, reading a book she had checked out from the school library. She got shortly after her friend Peter Vulcan told her about the lesson they had in history class earlier that day. He said it was about "some old guys and fire and earth and water and wind and junk." Immediately she knew that was talking about the Four Classical Elements of Ancient Greece. It was that last part, wind, which had caught her attention. She felt like she needed to know more about this, so she headed over to her personal sanctuary in her entire high school: the library. She had checked out a book about the subject right after school, just before she went to the football and cheer practice with Peter, so they could watch their friends Gary Earthenbom, who was on the football team, and Pearl Atlanta, who was on the cheer team. The four of them had all been childhood friends, and despite the differences they developed in personality and tastes, they remained the best of friends. Pearl was Gayle's closest confidant

She always felt at home around books, of course, that's not to say she was a total outcast. Still, she was the smartest of the four, which usually meant that the other three were always hitting her up for notes or test answers. She was always glad to help them with their studies, but she never helped them cheat. She did have standards, after all. She was also pretty good with computers and she loved spending some of her free time experimenting with new programs. But her first and foremost passion was reading.

The book she was currently perusing was called Analysis of the Sciences of Classical Greece. After Peter mentioned the lecture he had (or rather, mostly tuned out), the subject had piqued her interest, particularly the element of wind. She hadn't been one to study meteorology in depth before, but that was prior to the incident that occurred a few months ago.

It was a typical morning for her. She woke up early, ate breakfast, got ready for school, and departed early so she could get a little extra study time done in the library. As she was walking to school, she was glancing through her science notebook, reviewing the homework assignment from the previous night. It was a rather unusually windy day, and at that moment, a particularly strong gust of wind blew past her. It was strong enough to completely rip her papers out of her three-ring binder and send them flying into the air. Gayle panicked; she didn't think that she would ever be able to get them back, and she would have to them all over again. That was when the most peculiar thing happened—another gust of wind blew all of the papers back into her hand. It was almost as if she willed it to happen. For the time being, she had thought nothing of it, and proceeded to school. It was probably just some fluke or an extreme case of good luck.

After school that day, she was on her way home. It was still exceptionally windy, and she was having trouble holding onto all her papers and books. She was getting really tired of this; it felt like she was in a bad version of that Winnie the Pooh story. She wished against all hope that it would just stop being so blustery. The funny thing was, as soon as she thought that, it did. She opened her eyes, thinking that she was hallucinating, but she saw that she wasn't; it had really quieted down immediately. She kept walking toward home, pleased at her good fortune. Along the way, she wondered if it would start getting gusty again, and the moment the thought crossed her mind, it began once more. She cursed her sudden change of luck and wished it would stop, and again, it was if the wind itself obeyed her thoughts. Now this was too weird; that was the fourth time that day that the wind seemingly did what she wanted it to.

She ran the rest of the way home as fast as she could. She fumbled for her keys in the rush, completely overwhelmed by what had just happened. She quickly tossed her stuff in her room and dashed out to her backyard to try a little experiment, all in the interest of science, of course. Luckily for her, neither of her parents was home at the moment; her father was a practicing doctor at a hospital downtown, and her mother worked at a law firm not far from it. After a few hours of testing, she found that she could get the wind to do just about anything she wanted—change direction, stop altogether, increase or decrease in intensity, etc. Then a thought came to mind: could she be mutant, like the one she had heard about? She prayed she wasn't. What would people think of her?

Gayle sighed at the memory. She had never spoken about it to anyone—not her parents, not her friends, no one. She supposed that the only people who knew about her . . . abilities were herself, and, of course, her diary. It wasn't necessarily a bad thing; she had powers that nobody else did, and that was good, at least in the profit potential in the sciences. But there was still that lingering feeling that she would lose everyone she cared about if anyone knew. She thought about her best friend, Pearl. She was always so carefree and high-spirited. There was no way she had problems like this. After all, she was a cheerleader, and freaky things like this never happened to cheerleaders; it was like a fundamental law of the universe, like gravity, or Murphy's Law. In the end, she decided to close the book and take a nap to forget everything. As she closed her eyes, she wished that she would never experience a day as extreme as that one ever again.


End file.
